Apple

Strong-smelling MacBook Pros have been discussed on Apple forums, but an anonymous French molecular biologist/researcher went to Greenpeace to check out why his smelled. Greenpeace got Analytica involved, and then Inéris, France's national institute covering the industrial environment.

Apparently benzene is a component of the smell, and this could be risky -- over time, sensitive people could develop leukemia.

Unconfirmed stories suggest the problem Mac Pros have been built in China, not at Apple's European factory.

Note, we're not talking about an ordinary "new equipment" aroma. The original poster at MacRumours said his new 3.0 Mac Pro Octo:
"Stinks to high heaven.

Regional mobile carrier Alltel has launched NuTsie, a service that allows users of almost a dozen of the company's handsets to stream certain titles from their PC's iTunes collection to their cell phones.

This makes the operator the first U.S. carrier to offer such a service, which will cost $4.99 a month, or $19.99 a year.

To stream the protected and unprotected songs in a user's iTunes library, NuTsie does not actually place-shift songs from a user's PC. Instead, the service matches the songs in a user's library to the licensed songs stored in NuTsie servers, then streams only the songs in its server.

I'm not going to go on another rantblasting blog aggregators or websites that steal other people's content (aka sploggers). However, I came across one website that took my content, re-worded one sentence and tried to claim it as its own. The change is so laughable I busted out laughing!

First, my blog entry titled Court Bans VoIP App on iPhone was one of the first if not the first U.S.-based news outlet to talk about how a German court banned the sipgate VoIP application on the iPhone. In the article, I wrote:

Apparently, the court felt that sipgate would "lure" iPhone users into "jailbreaking" their iPhones.

Now this makes a lot of sense in this day and age of energy efficient and seeking out alternative energy sources -- using solar power to charge your cell phone.

After taking a look at the specs for Solar Cases that can power the Apple iPhone, a few pop out right off of the page, including a charge time of less than three hours and a weight of less than a quarter of a pound (100 g).

And while it looks simple to use, it actually is.

Here's how it works, using the built-in rechargeable battery in the Solar Case:
1. Insert iPhone into Solar case
2. Turn Power ON, iPhone will be fully charged within < 3 hours

Tethering is a feature that allows you to use your mobile smartphone as modem to connect to the Internet or corporate LAN over your carrier's cell phone network.

Unfortunately, Apple has not integrated tethering into the iPhone -- both the original EDGE data network model or the iPhone 3G.

Nor is it (apparently) going to allow anyone else to offer an iPhone tethering app of their own through the AppStore.

Nullriver, which had seen its NetShare iPhone tethering application put up and then taken down from the App Store for no apparent reason, appears to have gotten a definitive answer on where Apple stands on the matter.

A recent posting to the company's blog reads:
Looks like Apple has decided they will not be allowing any tethering applications in the AppStore. As such, NetShare will not be available in the iTunes AppStore.

It may come as surprise to all of us here, but iPhone sales are not cutting it in Japan.

Apple's partnership with Japan's third-largest mobile operator, Softbank Corp., to sell the iPhone 3G certainly created a buzz. Like elsewhere, Japanese consumers lined up at stores in advance of the phone's release on July 11, and many locations sold out almost immediately.

But now analysts estimate that demand in Japan has fallen to a third of what it was initially, and analysts are now expecting fewer iPhone sales.

Who's to blame? There's no supply shortage: The device is readily available in Apple stores and other outlets.

The Cult of Mac claims that the new iPod touch is VoIP-capable on the hardware side:

With 5 wires connected to the Touch headphone jack (instead of 4 on the previous model), the device now supports the external microphone included with some headsets, according to Kyle Wiens of iFixit, who fully dismantled an iPod Touch on Wednesday.

So who needs an AT&T-restricted iPhone? Course, you'll need to be in range of a Wi-Fi network to use VoIP on the iPod touch.